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> Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the

> Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Cherry-picked quotes aside, this part of the article really did make me roll my eyes. Users self-censoring searches to a _single website_ because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable is somehow a feature, not a bug. The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug.

Barrin92 5y ago
> because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable I would suggest the correct framing here is "the rest of the internet is unusable". How else is Google supposed to guess you want a personal opinion from Reddit other than... typing it in the search query? Google is a search engine, not God. If you want an answer from a particular source you're going to have to specify that, Google can't know if you want Wikipedia, or Quora, or a news article or a TikTok video or one of the other thousand pages that plenty of users might be interested in. The internet has exploded in size, so has the diversity of legitimate sources, the search engines are hardly at fault.
- masswerk 5y ago
  I would suggest an even more correct framing as in "the rest of the internet as discoverable by Google is unusable". On a more serious side, I think, we may need to have another dimension to web search, regarding the type of origin, namely "conversational" versus "commercial" (to be applied to both text and image search). Something like this would provide a more generalized solution to the problem, instead of pushing one of the more commonly known origins to become yet another monopoly.
aemreunal 5y ago
> The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug. Couldn't find it now but that was refuted by Danny Sullivan (I think) in an HN thread about the Google search results quality. They gave a pretty convincing explanation of why that may happen (spoiler: it has something to do with the tokenization of words on the website) and I, for one, believed them. *Edit:* Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382
- rahimiali 5y ago
  Doesn't the comment right below the one you linked successfully refute Danny Sullivan's claim?
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    The one by drawfloat? Looking at the source of the cached page, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sRJX_e8uBqMJ:https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/never-give-up+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sRJX_e... It contains <a href="/quotes/tag/don-t-give-up-quotes">don-t-give-up-quotes</a>, <a href="/quotes/tag/don-t-give-up-the-fight">don-t-give-up-the-fight</a>, After you eliminate HTML, that becomes "don-t-give-up-quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight" and since punctuation is stripped, that matches. Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  Yeah, I remember that – he basically said that the word might appear on the page but not in the results description. And that's BS, because it used to be that the description of every result contained at least one bolded token included in the search query. If this is no longer possible, it's only because they're cheaping out on hardware and not actually indexing as much of the page as they could (no way to retrieve the matching token because it's not saved, but they can still match on it). This probably also leads to diluted results.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- croes 5y ago
  That's just another proof that google doesn't care about it's users. If they quote a search term they expect to find the exact term visible on the website. Not in alt text, not in invisible text, not any meta data. Quotes means this exact phrase visible on the website.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
coastflow 5y ago
For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires. If they wanted, they could refine their queries, limiting results by, say, price point (“toaster $40 . . . $100”) or by listing certain terms to exclude (“ ‘toaster’ NOT ‘oven’ ”). As machine-learning algorithms have grown more pervasive, we’ve lost some of the fluency with search that older Internet adopters may have learned in a high-school Boolean tutorial. “There’s a shift now where, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you blame the search engine,” Sullivan said. At the same time, he admitted that many users have a desire for “more noncommercial information, more community-based information.”" Maybe it's just me, but I thought the middle section of the paragraph wasn't relevant to the first sentence. I speculate, with charitable interpretations, that the order of events was: 1) The reporter asked Sullivan whether the frequent use of "Reddit" in search terms indicated a problem. 2) Sullivan asserted that Google is useful for searching for results restricted to a domain, then shifted to say that Google still gives relevant results if you use Boolean search terms. 3) Potentially after a follow-up question, Sullivan conceded that much of the results that Google returns is commercial instead of community-made. From a writing perspective, I found it unclear whether the middle section that starts with "Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires" was analysis by the author or part of Sullivan's response. I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context, though it would have been clearer if the writing more explicitly indicated whether this was part of Sullivan's reported speech.
- hericium 5y ago
  > Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires No, Google made users passive to profit from controlling limited choices presented to them. > I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context Looks like it to me, too. It's Google's propaganda for "we made you need us".
  - drivebycomment 5y ago
undersuit 5y ago
I only use Google to search Reddit because the Reddit search is unusable, not because the Google results are.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Both are true. Reddit search is useless but google search can also be useless until you put reddit in.
- kromem 5y ago
  Maybe Google should buy Reddit, build a better search across it, and set AlphaGo to use karma scores on Reddit to better identify relevance across search results on Google proper.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    > karma No! Goodhart's Law. Karma in itself is pointless. The reason that adding reddit to the end of a search query has better results is because you are querying a community for your results. There are already bots on reddit that take submissions that hit the frontpage 366 days ago and re-submit, and then other bots that take the top comment and resubmit the comments to that submission. They get loads of karma doing this. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes not. But it does nothing to improve actual credibility. The larger the subreddit, the SMALLER the community. r/AskReddit is not reliable. r/MechanicalKeyboards is. You want to find a small, tight-knit community of peers that know each-other. There are small communities of SEO experts just submitting Amazon affiliate links, so just 'small' isn't sufficient either. You want to vet that the posters are acting in good faith. Find the top posters, find things you know(and it's better if you disagree with mainstream opinion here), and check their other posts and see if you agree with them there. If you do, it's more likely that you will agree on this subject you are referencing and don't know much about. This process sucks - especially when you start - but over time you will accumulate a network of trusted people and communities that you can rely on. Anything else will be corrupted by greed.
cookiengineer 5y ago
Google messed up the internet because they don't allow installing other websites' searches easily. We had an opensearchdescription.xml for literally most of the websites, and somehow Browsers (including Firefox and Safari) managed to mess that up. I wish there was an easy browser extension that just persists searches correctly, and doesn't forget about them the next time I clear my browser cache. Guess I'll have to implement it in my own one again :-/ Google is so full of content farms these days, it's ridiculous. And all of them are ranked higher than the sources because they use google ads on their pages. Just search for a quote that you read here on HN or on reddit or on SO...and you'll find hundreds of them ranked higher than the source. Maybe someone should build a search engine that downranks all websites that have google analytics and google ads? Would certainly be an interesting experiment.
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  > Maybe someone should build a search engine that downranks all websites that have google analytics and google ads? Would certainly be an interesting experiment. Try Kagi.com. Also, you can manually rank or even block domains you choose.
- aghilmort 5y ago
  pretty much what we're up to at Breeze. we started out with topic searches, added web search, and are now blending the two. some examples: 1. web, blog tab in search results is ours, and our first iteration of making it easier to dial in topics directly from web results -> https://breezethat.com/ https://breezethat.com/ 2. early pre-web-wide topics before we added web search, https://breezethat.com/topics https://breezethat.com/topics 3. ladypedia, an experiment on tuning out ugender bias for Women's History Month on Wikipedia pages, https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia 4. we're currently sussing out the extent to which sites are human-ranked vs. using other machine-extracted information from a page / site -- it's a lot of rapid iteration at the moment 5. we have similar thoughts as Ahrefs on publisher profit sharing, although we haven't established if we'll hit their 90/10 mark or not. we also have option for users to go premium and skip all ads
  - 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

> because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable I would suggest the correct framing here is "the rest of the internet is unusable". How else is Google supposed to guess you want a personal opinion from Reddit other than... typing it in the search query? Google is a search engine, not God. If you want an answer from a particular source you're going to have to specify that, Google can't know if you want Wikipedia, or Quora, or a news article or a TikTok video or one of the other thousand pages that plenty of users might be interested in. The internet has exploded in size, so has the diversity of legitimate sources, the search engines are hardly at fault.

masswerk 5y ago
I would suggest an even more correct framing as in "the rest of the internet as discoverable by Google is unusable". On a more serious side, I think, we may need to have another dimension to web search, regarding the type of origin, namely "conversational" versus "commercial" (to be applied to both text and image search). Something like this would provide a more generalized solution to the problem, instead of pushing one of the more commonly known origins to become yet another monopoly.

aemreunal 5y ago

> The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug. Couldn't find it now but that was refuted by Danny Sullivan (I think) in an HN thread about the Google search results quality. They gave a pretty convincing explanation of why that may happen (spoiler: it has something to do with the tokenization of words on the website) and I, for one, believed them. *Edit:* Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382

rahimiali 5y ago
Doesn't the comment right below the one you linked successfully refute Danny Sullivan's claim?
- Thorrez 5y ago
  The one by drawfloat? Looking at the source of the cached page, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sRJX_e8uBqMJ:https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/never-give-up+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sRJX_e... It contains <a href="/quotes/tag/don-t-give-up-quotes">don-t-give-up-quotes</a>, <a href="/quotes/tag/don-t-give-up-the-fight">don-t-give-up-the-fight</a>, After you eliminate HTML, that becomes "don-t-give-up-quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight" and since punctuation is stripped, that matches. Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.
TechBro8615 5y ago
Yeah, I remember that – he basically said that the word might appear on the page but not in the results description. And that's BS, because it used to be that the description of every result contained at least one bolded token included in the search query. If this is no longer possible, it's only because they're cheaping out on hardware and not actually indexing as much of the page as they could (no way to retrieve the matching token because it's not saved, but they can still match on it). This probably also leads to diluted results.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
croes 5y ago
That's just another proof that google doesn't care about it's users. If they quote a search term they expect to find the exact term visible on the website. Not in alt text, not in invisible text, not any meta data. Quotes means this exact phrase visible on the website.
- shadowgovt 5y ago

coastflow 5y ago

For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires. If they wanted, they could refine their queries, limiting results by, say, price point (“toaster $40 . . . $100”) or by listing certain terms to exclude (“ ‘toaster’ NOT ‘oven’ ”). As machine-learning algorithms have grown more pervasive, we’ve lost some of the fluency with search that older Internet adopters may have learned in a high-school Boolean tutorial. “There’s a shift now where, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you blame the search engine,” Sullivan said. At the same time, he admitted that many users have a desire for “more noncommercial information, more community-based information.”" Maybe it's just me, but I thought the middle section of the paragraph wasn't relevant to the first sentence. I speculate, with charitable interpretations, that the order of events was: 1) The reporter asked Sullivan whether the frequent use of "Reddit" in search terms indicated a problem. 2) Sullivan asserted that Google is useful for searching for results restricted to a domain, then shifted to say that Google still gives relevant results if you use Boolean search terms. 3) Potentially after a follow-up question, Sullivan conceded that much of the results that Google returns is commercial instead of community-made. From a writing perspective, I found it unclear whether the middle section that starts with "Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires" was analysis by the author or part of Sullivan's response. I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context, though it would have been clearer if the writing more explicitly indicated whether this was part of Sullivan's reported speech.

hericium 5y ago
> Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires No, Google made users passive to profit from controlling limited choices presented to them. > I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context Looks like it to me, too. It's Google's propaganda for "we made you need us".
- drivebycomment 5y ago

undersuit 5y ago

I only use Google to search Reddit because the Reddit search is unusable, not because the Google results are.

Gigachad 5y ago
Both are true. Reddit search is useless but google search can also be useless until you put reddit in.
kromem 5y ago
Maybe Google should buy Reddit, build a better search across it, and set AlphaGo to use karma scores on Reddit to better identify relevance across search results on Google proper.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  > karma No! Goodhart's Law. Karma in itself is pointless. The reason that adding reddit to the end of a search query has better results is because you are querying a community for your results. There are already bots on reddit that take submissions that hit the frontpage 366 days ago and re-submit, and then other bots that take the top comment and resubmit the comments to that submission. They get loads of karma doing this. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes not. But it does nothing to improve actual credibility. The larger the subreddit, the SMALLER the community. r/AskReddit is not reliable. r/MechanicalKeyboards is. You want to find a small, tight-knit community of peers that know each-other. There are small communities of SEO experts just submitting Amazon affiliate links, so just 'small' isn't sufficient either. You want to vet that the posters are acting in good faith. Find the top posters, find things you know(and it's better if you disagree with mainstream opinion here), and check their other posts and see if you agree with them there. If you do, it's more likely that you will agree on this subject you are referencing and don't know much about. This process sucks - especially when you start - but over time you will accumulate a network of trusted people and communities that you can rely on. Anything else will be corrupted by greed.

cookiengineer 5y ago

Google messed up the internet because they don't allow installing other websites' searches easily. We had an opensearchdescription.xml for literally most of the websites, and somehow Browsers (including Firefox and Safari) managed to mess that up. I wish there was an easy browser extension that just persists searches correctly, and doesn't forget about them the next time I clear my browser cache. Guess I'll have to implement it in my own one again :-/ Google is so full of content farms these days, it's ridiculous. And all of them are ranked higher than the sources because they use google ads on their pages. Just search for a quote that you read here on HN or on reddit or on SO...and you'll find hundreds of them ranked higher than the source. Maybe someone should build a search engine that downranks all websites that have google analytics and google ads? Would certainly be an interesting experiment.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago
> Maybe someone should build a search engine that downranks all websites that have google analytics and google ads? Would certainly be an interesting experiment. Try Kagi.com. Also, you can manually rank or even block domains you choose.
aghilmort 5y ago
pretty much what we're up to at Breeze. we started out with topic searches, added web search, and are now blending the two. some examples: 1. web, blog tab in search results is ours, and our first iteration of making it easier to dial in topics directly from web results -> https://breezethat.com/ https://breezethat.com/ 2. early pre-web-wide topics before we added web search, https://breezethat.com/topics https://breezethat.com/topics 3. ladypedia, an experiment on tuning out ugender bias for Women's History Month on Wikipedia pages, https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia 4. we're currently sussing out the extent to which sites are human-ranked vs. using other machine-extracted information from a page / site -- it's a lot of rapid iteration at the moment 5. we have similar thoughts as Ahrefs on publisher profit sharing, although we haven't established if we'll hit their 90/10 mark or not. we also have option for users to go premium and skip all ads
- 5y ago